Current computer systems provide individuals with opportunities to produce documents of professional quality, such as with desktop publishing software and graphics software programs. The ability to manipulate the appearance of the text within these programs is vital in allowing users greater flexibility and creativity in document production. Included in these manipulations are changes in fonts, justification, size, and other aspects of the appearance, such as bolding and italicizing.
Although most programs can perform manipulations with some level of success, each program has a limitation in its range of manipulations due to design considerations. Some programs, such as QuickDraw GX from Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, Calif., provide more sophistication and enhanced capabilities than other programs to allow more choices for users. Unfortunately, these enhanced capabilities are normally not transferable to other programs. Thus, attempts to incorporate such capabilities, such as different fonts, from one program into another are also usually quite limited and typically unsuccessful.
Further, current graphics and multimedia technology has advanced to a level where text is becoming a larger component in colorful, and sometimes animated, presentations. For example, the multitude of World Wide Web sites has resulted in a variety of efforts to create more attractive and distinguishing web pages for users. While tools, such as graphics programs, provide capabilities to create and manipulate more colorful text displays, such as to have some highlighting effect or interesting fill pattern, the quality of appearance often suffers, especially when the graphics-created text is used in a traditional text environment, e.g., in a headline. Since characters are often converted to geometric shapes to achieve these effects, they cease to be `text`, per se.
Further, text displays produced in a graphics program usually are produced as bitmaps and are limited to scaling among a few predetermined sizes. Changing scale among these sizes presents problems, since distortion of the original display of the item often occurs. Scalable fonts that attempt to combat such problems for text apply intelligence, i.e., `hints`, that change the outline shape of an item, so that as the size of the item is reduced to smaller and smaller point sizes, the outline shape is still distinguishable, i.e., the quality of the item is controlled. An example of such a scalable font technology is the TrueType font format from Apple Computer, Inc.
Colored text itself has been available in systems with graphical user interfaces for some time. Normally, changes in color are limited to alterations in a single foreground color for a character's graphical representation or glyph image, being placed over a background color, such as changing text from black on white to yellow on green. Alternatively, the actual drawing of a glyph image can be modified by a transfer mode, which controls how the image pixels being drawn interact with the image pixels already present on the background, e.g., to control the transparency of the glyph. Any color applied is done by the drawing process with a 1-bit deep bitmap/common outline used as the raw material for the drawing of the glyph. However, the color information is not a part of the glyph and each character is limited to a single color. While bitmap fonts may have characters with multiple colors, these bitmaps have limited legibility when scaled.
Accordingly, a need exists for a flexible system that provides enhancement features, such as color features, and information intrinsically for font glyphs. The present invention addresses such a need.